I'm new to the Mac/OSX platform and I haven't seen any mention of a popular disk defragment program yet. Anyone here have some suggestions?
None because OS X does a basic defrag itself.
I was reading that once the disk reaches around 80% full things start slowing down and a disk defrag program becomes neccessary even for OSX.
I was reading that once the disk reaches around 80% full things start slowing down and a disk defrag program becomes neccessary even for OSX.
I was reading that once the disk reaches around 80% full things start slowing down and a disk defrag program becomes neccessary even for OSX.
I am used to having to Defragment hard drives on the PC. Is this necessary on the Mac and if so is there a good program to buy to do it or does this come with the computer?
None because OS X does a basic defrag itself.
I love how people think that...
Personally, I boot from an external drive and use iDefrag. It's the only one that cleans up the extents and btrees too.
I love how people think that...
You only have to worry if you get down to 1GB or so available space so the OS can create new swap files if it needs to. OS X creates swap files in 80MB increments so even 1GB of available space should be fine.
ls -lh /var/vm
total 2097152
drwx--x--x 20 root wheel 680B Oct 17 10:29 app_profile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M Oct 27 17:01 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M Oct 31 12:05 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 128M Oct 31 15:46 swapfile2
-rw------T 1 root wheel 256M Nov 1 15:01 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 512M Nov 1 15:28 swapfile4
I am used to having to Defragment hard drives on the PC. Is this necessary on the Mac .....
I've had Macs since the late 80's and have never defragged the HD. I do photo editing and digital artwork and have never had a problem. It's just another urban legend developed by Windows users and more so these days since more and more Windows users are going Mac.
Having said that I had to defrag my HD for the first time last night... that is the Windows XP partition created from Bootcamp
Micromat strongly recommends that you always leave at least 15% of any HFS+ volume as free space. If an HFS+ volume is more than 85% full and is heavily fragmented, any further data added to the volume can result in irreparable damage to the disk directory.
It's not about speed. It's about safety. It's harder to recover the data from a fragmented disk if it goes bad.